Google has confirmed that Adobe Flash will continue to "play a critical role" on YouTube, saying the fledgling HTML5 video tag doesn't meet the site's needs.
"It's important to understand what a site like YouTube needs from the browser in order to provide a good experience for viewers as well as content creators," reads a …

@The Indomitable Gall: Well, we can download 'em already

The browser naturally downloads video files, in the process of streaming the files. Some browser plugins would extend that functionality into such a form as would allow the user to "cache" the video file, indefinitely.

( IANAL, though I may know how to word some things carefully, in the climate at hand ;)

Two more cents: Even being aware of as much, I myself will still support Google's decision to retain such extensive control over the user's video-viewing experience - such as they explain is possible with Flash and evidently not possible with HTML 5.

There's a lot that, I believe, has not been brought into sufficient study or practice, in either casr, as far as the nature and relevance of human-computer interface design - but, I believe that the Google YouTube "user experience engineers" (if you will) are at least touching on it, productively.

Not quite

What the parent poster said may not be strictly accurate, but his general point is valid: pure HTML and the DOM can be easily manipulated at the client side, so if that is what your site depends on to display ads, your revenue will be at the mercy of ad-blocking plug-ins and extensions.

Flash, on the other hand, allows the interjection of ads within the content, with no easy way to block it or prevent it, without blocking the entire thing.

Also...

Older browsers?

And of course, going straight to HTML5 leaves out all the computer-illiterate cute kitty fans who can't upgrade a browser if they were paid a million dollars. These are the important ones to Google because they're probably the only ones that might read the ads.

This is a title

Version One....

Meh, version one software. Is anything ever ready to run with the big boys in it's first version? Give it time and we'll be seeing better things happen with HTML5. We need a more secure software than what we've been getting...

HTML5/Chrome doesn't work

I've tried the YouTube HTML5 beta several times... and I keep turning it back off. Although it performs better for basic video, in Chrome you can't jump ahead in the content like you can with flash, and loading while paused doesn't seem to work (yes, I have a slow connection sometimes). If these limitations remain, it'll never fly.

Threat of litigation.

"Apple and Microsoft are both members of the H.264 patent pool, and the MPEG LA has indicated it intends to create a new patent pool that would attempt to license WebM, challenging Google's efforts to make it royalty-free."

This is surely the key sentence in the article and the real reason why youtube is still serving up Flash video. All this talk of technical hurdles associated with HTML5 is most probably just Google's way of buying time until they're satisfied with the legal landscape.

Shock news - Flash not rubbish after all

Flash itself has developed into a very good platform for the things it does well. Proper, grown-up streaming video and actual interactive useful objects, either embedded in webpages or stand alone using AIR. ActionScript 3 is not too shabby at doing complex simulations.

I'd have preferred that SVG had supplanted Flash, but it never got off the ground and so Flash is what we have for now.

It's just a pity it's been misused for banner ads and pointless front ends when some decent jQuery would do the job just as well and be more accessible too. Save the Flash for when it is actually useful - of course as a Flash developer of mainly educational sites it's in my interest to see it's use continue, but only where it's the best tool for the task not just for the sake of it - like any technology.

Amidst all the emotion ...

... your use of 'grown-up' probably best illustrates why Flash is here to stay for now amdist all the comments of haters or lovers.

Yeah, it sucks for some things, but it is still the best pragmatic solution for the web until HTML 5 comes of age or some other technology leapfrogs it. For sure Flash will be replaced sometime as nothing lasts forever, but for now the economics (many more significant players than say 5 years ago to keep happy) plus the widespread reach of the internet (desktop browser versions, mobile platforms and the increased usage by previous non-geeks) will all retard dramatic and speedy changes in web technology IMHO compared to the past.

That's a trickle, not a stream

I have yet to see a flash site that can reliably stream even standard definition video. And flash player UIs look and feel like they were designed by blind monkeys.

And the problem's not on my end - I can easily download a 500 meg hi def TV episode in 10 minutes and play it on a real media player - or stream it to a console and my TV. Or my PSP, or my phone. The only way to get a decent user experience and quality playback is to download the .flv file and play it with a decent media player.

@Eh?

FLV is not necessarily flash as it's a container format. The video itself may be (and usually is these days) H.264.

I see similar problems to the OP in that if I watch a video "streamed" through something like YouTube it's quite often choppy and a bit start-stop, even if I allow the video to be completely buffered first. If I download the clip and play it through VLC it's fine, which suggests a problem with the Flash plug-in rather than bandwidth or the video itself.

Oh, and the problem manifests in all of the browsers I have installed and on different machines and on different internet connections, which also eliminates those from the equation.

Mostly I see a problem for clips >5 minutes, which does suggest a buffering problem, but as the indicator shows the whole of the clip buffered that either means it's something else entirely or the indicator is showing a fake reading.

works for me

I watched a couple of BBC programmes on iPlayer last night - not something I do often. I put them on the big (8' projection ... :) ) screen. After a couple of minutes I completely forgot that I was watching an IP stream and not a broadcast picture: the quality met or exceeded what was needed for the programme material in question.

iPlayer

Much though I love watching programmes on iPlayer (it's just so damn convenient), there's no way the quality is up to broadcast standards, even on my poor old SD TV. It's adequate and watchable though, which is far more than can be said for the lamentable catch-up services from the other three terrestrial channels.

Fail, dude. [ @ David 141]

Streaming video is a myth? Can you get http://www.nrj.fr/nrj-tv-528/nrj-webtv-535/webtv/ where you are? 768kbit/sec streaming video, worked flawlessly for hours and hours between minor hiccups on a 1 megabit line. OrangeTV (I'm with Orange) offers some lowish-bandwidth versions of most of the DTT channels plus some extras. As I'm now on 2 megabit, the quality is a little better than it was. I'll be enjoying the scenery of the Tour de France (no interest in cyclists or if that Lance bloke will win it... again...). Maybe you need to live in a place with a decent infrastructure so that streaming video works? The only time I get hiccups is either YouTube (which, let's face it, is serving millions) or Odoroku TV, though J-PopSuki [ http://fr.wwitv.com/tv/b5994.htm ] comes through just fine.

If you live in an urban area, I might point out I'm in the middle of nowhere, rural France. Hicksville. Several kilometres to town, nearly half a kilometre to neighbours, and they have four legs. >4.4km to my exchange. And with that, get 2 megabit and streaming video. So... you were saying?

Bootnote: Odoroku is Silverlight, NRJ is WinMediaPlayer, J-PopSuki and Orange's channels stream into a VLC plugin. You might have a point about Flash being lame, but Flash != streaming video.

Buffering? Suffering, more like...

AC 1 July 2010 10:49 GMT sez:

"If I download the clip and play it through VLC it's fine, which suggests a problem with the Flash plug-in rather than bandwidth or the video itself."

That's something I've taken to doing more often, especially if it's something really interesting -- or controversial that may be yanked soon -- that I think might be worth saving. I go to the YouTube page the clip is playing at, let it run a few seconds, pause it, then use the ClipNabber bookmarklet to suck down an MPEG4 copy to my local drive, where I can watch it in smooth, non-choppy, ad-free comfort.

"Flash is the only mechanism most web sites allow for embedded content from other sites."

I see so many issues here...

"We need to do more than just point the browser at a video file like the image tag does — there’s a lot more to it than just retrieving and displaying a video."

--It worked fine 10 years ago. Just had too many video formats to choose from.

"One that not only helps address the licensing concerns, but is also optimized for the unique attributes of serving video on the web. To that end, we’re excited about the new WebM project."

"Google could surely advance the WebM cause by switching YouTube to the format entirely and moving the site to HTM5. But Harding says the company is unwilling to do so, thanks to several limitations with the <video> tag"

--So.. WebM's not actually optimized for the unique attributes of serving video on the web then?

"The HTML5 standard itself does not address video streaming protocols."

--Then, surely that's left to the implementer to add to the best of their ability.

"it doesn't allow users to easily lift video from YouTube and embed it in other sites."

--What's easier than being able to copy a URL out of raw HTML code? It's much easier than all the crap people have to go through to download video from YouTube now.

Non-issues

--So.. WebM's not actually optimized for the unique attributes of serving video on the web then?

No, WebM is absolutely fine for that, but the video tag is not. Flash provides a number of features that the video tag so far lacks, and this is an entirely separate question to the codec in use.

--Then, surely that's left to the implementer to add to the best of their ability.

That would hardly be a web standard then, would it? Flash, for all of its ideological ills, at least provides the required functionality in a (fairly) reliable cross-platform manner. Fragmentation of video tag features across different browsers would achieve the opposite. Are you sure you don't work for Microsoft?

--Uh.. Why exactly does the video need to be able to access my camera or microphone?

@ AC

"It worked fine 10 years ago. Just had too many video formats to choose from."

Possibly one of the reasons there should be a unified browser playback protocol that picks a suitable codec from the OS pool. Not exactly a plugin, more a load-codec-and-stream-data-to-it.

"So.. WebM's not actually optimized for the unique attributes of serving video on the web then?"

I suspect it may be okay for serving video, it's the extra crap that it might suck at. How did the HTML5 test work with annotations and captions.

"Then, surely that's left to the implementer to add to the best of their ability."

Would this not, then, lead to fragmentation?

"It's much easier than all the crap people have to go through to download video from YouTube now."

What crap? I have DownloadHelper to snarf a copy of what I'm actually looking at, or www.youtubedownloaderhd.com for picking the 'quality' myself, or grabbing without actually watching first. Just copy/paste the URL. Hardly "all the crap"...

"Something about running arbitrary code seems to make it more likely that the embeded content will access private user information. Not less."

Well, we all know somebody will try it...

"Uh.. Why exactly does the video need to be able to access my camera or microphone?"

You do realise YouTube isn't intended for being a global jukebox? It is for a bunch of people to splatter their thoughts and opinions to the world. I can easily see YouTube loving having a webcam upload directly to their servers. No messing with recording, editing, file formats, codecs... just clicky-speaky.

"And surely you could add the full-screen video option to your browser's player, just like in Flash..."

And pray that it scales the video CORRECTLY in a 16:9 aspect display. Flash does, for what it is worth...

"I do remember a MS Silverlight player that had dynamic quality control though."

Does this not imply on-the-fly encoding to match bitrate to what is available?

a

HTML5 you say? Is that Web3.0 then?

I remember the good old days of Web1.0 (we called it the Information Super Highway back then you know). black text, white backgrounds, blue links and if you were fancy - embedded pictures! Sometimes even moving gifs! Those were the days :)

Title Required

I wish people would remember HTML 5 is more than a video tag!

Though slightly OT, HTML5 is going to become the biggest mess in web history with the different organisations rushing to implement HTML5 features in their browsers before the specification is complete. Oh yeah, I can hardly wait for it now..

agreee

Nice article.... what we should remember is how flash overrulled MS media plugin ... when all videos have been using MS media plugin or realplayer.... both tried to be too smart.. cached video as it wanted playing with uncontrolled pausing... or even worse some videos didnt start playing before it got it all... and here came flash which made it easy.... play instantly if you pause it it will cache it and u see how far it was downloaded.... simple fast and in less than 6-7 month it took over of most video content on internet.... devil is in details... dont play too wise with new videotag of html 5 pls

Yep

flash need to sort out growing pains

Although so long on the market, this "plug-in" doesn't forward key events to the browser, preventing navigation by keys. for me that is a big big no go and the reason flash is not on on my private computer. on my work computer too, but can't do that on the customer laptops I'm using :(.

Someone want to tell Google and el-reg

that HTML5 spec is not finished OR ratified yet.....

Clearly pulling flash from youtube this year, next year or anytime soon would be idiotic, but things are clearly changing and a move towards a standard HTML that does video has a clear path (WebM/HTML5).

Flash

Actually it's just about Ads, youtube doesn't use any DRM-scheme and doesn't use RTMP for streaming, it's normal HTTP MP4 with streaming / sequential download support just as HTML 5 / QT / WMP-IE / Chrome-ffmpeg. Granted the flash player / player app has more streaming and buffering features but most of those aren't used by google and DRM just isn't a argument for a site which hosts on-demand videos on HTTP.

You actually don't need HTML5 to play back the videos encoded by Youtube/Google at all, QT and HTML4/XHTML works fine for that. Blip.tv already does it like that with mov's. Not that QT on Windows is much better then the awfully engineered flash player. And the Safari HTML5 demo weren't actually a true HTML5 demo at all as it was mostly just a bunch of CSS3 and javascript tied in with Safari. Why didn't they just use the audio-tag, etc? Oh wait webkit didn't support that. The video-tag demo could have been made to support IE9 beta and chrome though. But too bad they didn't go for a more standard approach.

Flash will be around because of it's flawed DRM-scheme which is cracked any way, ability to integrate ads and easily overlay stuff and so on, even though some of the solutions doesn't really work on any computer :) And the ability to play WebM will be used in IE for playing back at sites that only supports that. Creating a flash player app to play videos is free, all the codecs are in the Flash Player plugin and you don't even need to buy Adobe flash pro to compile it, requiring not a single cent to Adobe :) RTMP streaming is kinda dead outside the DRM or CDN services which uses it.

And I do argue and agree that the Chrome ffmpeg implementation is awful lacking full screen, good overlay and hw-acceleration. Safari, QT / Mac is good in that regard though, with no problem with full screen playing and plays back most youtube videos - those without encoding errors. But of course QT wouldn't handle flv encapsulated stuff. They should just scrap the Chrome implementation and buy in a commercial codec really ffmpeg can be tweaked to work good but you shouldn't really encourage third parties building ffmpeg stuff when they aren't licensed too. Neither is it really up to date.

@Anonymous Coward, you can hide the url the same way youtube does it for the flash player. They don't use any DRM, it's just a JS scheme and should be considered clear text. Obfuscation isn't DRM. Obfuscation works for HTML5 or even 4 for that matter.

Any way Flash will be the only way to play AVC/H.264 MP4s or WebM/MKV videos in XP with a Microsoft browser as MS won't release it for XP SP3 as they are engineering it only for Direct2D which doesn't exist for XP. So it shouldn't and won't disappear. But besides you have to do ads differently theres no reason why not to do browser integrated player / HTML5 playback support on sites that use HTTP streaming and encodes videos to standard MP4 containers and QT/commercial codec compatible encodes -- or WebM. However sites like Hulu etc needs the broken Adobe DRM and RTMP streaming, otherwise they are not allowed to stream the videos and that's actually partly the music biz fault as they have more say about how to use their works then the movie industry has about their own where there is no copyright royalty collecting societies. Licensing a movie for download rather then streaming is something wholly different because of that. And if you license for streaming you must have a technical protection mechanism to unsuccessfully but illegal to circumvent the copying or downloading or unauthorized view of the material. In short they don't allow the use of unprotected streaming in the form of QT encoded content on HTTP streaming, HTML5 WebM or the flash model Youtube uses.

HTML 5

HTML 5 is shit, there, I said it.

Whilst it DOES have some plus-points like being able to semantically mark up navigation (<nav>) or the <datalist> element to specify valid text input client-side, it's got a few downsides that nobody seems to notice - stuff that seems to be there just to ensure that people who write crappy markup can continue to do so.

For instance they've bundled MSs <embed> into the standard now, but got shot of <applet>. Realistically there should be either <object> as a generic wrapper that replaces <embed>, <applet> and even the new <canvas> or there should be all those specific elements. There's nothing really wrong with <canvas> but why not extend <object> rather than introduce another tag? The same could also be said for <audio> and <video> and even <img> - they could all be <object> - or <embed> if that was chosen as the tag rather than <object>.

... and who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to continue to support tags that are NOT XML well-formed? Maybe it's just me, but I find it much easier to have to close every tag rather than remember which ones need to be closed and which don't and while I can continue to do that in HTML 5 supporting non-XML type tags just adds bloat to the browser for interpreting it.

XHTML 2 was, in some ways, a better considered spec which stripped out a lot of the bloat from HTML (whereas HTML 5 adds to it) - though I was never quite convinced by it having to mung in XForms.

Tags

As far as I'm concerned, this business about non-XML tags is silly. Of course every browser must support sites written to support the first browsers ever made. New features can be added in an upwards-compatible manner; there is no excuse for fragmenting the web or requiring perfectly good web sites to be updated to display on newer browsers.

Of course, though, TeX should be extended to allow hyperlinks and images, so that people could navigate to .tex pages in addition to .htm pages, since there are things that HTML doesn't do well, or is excessively verbose in doing.

Jobs buckling under?

From his High-Handedness I do not expect any backing down, but is a Good Thing he fueled this debate (even if only to keep his App Store bottom line).

HTML5, while promising, isn't there yet. And Flash is way too prevalent to just ignore.

I wish iPad had flash, then I'd buy it. Without Flash it is not good enough as a browsing appliance, however sleek it is.

As for youtube - well. Standalone Youtube players are well and good, but the embedding is too useful.

Remember - Youtube may be the biggest online video site, but hardly the only one. Almost all other video sites use flash video. For a small outfit FLV/F4V is very easy to author, having phletora of tools and support.

Unwillingness

"Google could surely advance the WebM cause by switching YouTube to the format entirely and moving the site to HTM5. But Harding says the company is unwilling to do so, thanks to several limitations with the <video> tag."

Perhaps because that would piss off a lot of users? There's nothing wrong with progressing to HTML5, but dumping what it already has is change for the sake of change and will annoy users. You do know YouTube still supports the H.263 format (some videos are tagged 240p, I think that is it, but &fmt=5 will get it too). This may be of use to some of the embedded devices which have YouTube functionality and can cope with H.263 but lack the processing oomph necessary for H.264. Oh, and saying "update your hardware" is not a viable option. Some people can't afford it, and some people are happy with what they have. To throw a stone at that "for the sake of change", especially to a protocol so ill-defined that there's no *universal* video format at this time and nothing to say more couldn't be added (will sites that support streaming DivX still need a plugin... in a browser that claims built-in video support?!?), it will only cause more problems that in solves.

Sure, ride the cutting edge. Update to the latest-greatest, watch your HTML5ised H.264 videos all you want. But don't cock it up for the rest of us.

So, it's about more than HTML5

It looks like HTML5 might not ultimately be so much a "winner" - at least not as much as the most naive of us may have hoped - as far as online video content presentation. If the features provided with <strike>Macromedia</strike> Adobe Flash are that much more valuable to the massive online video content provider that is YouTube, I wonder how many other service providers would finally switch over to HTML 5?

Maybe HTML 5 had better "catch up", or maybe people will simply stop representing the discussion *as*if* HTML 5 was even a full alternative to ... Adobe ... Flash.